More signs of the times: hiring freezes, reduced PhD admissions

The NYT reports:

Since taking office, the Trump administration has issued orders that threaten to broadly undercut the financial foundation of university based research, including deep reductions in overhead cost reimbursements through the National Institutes of Health. Court challenges have paused some of the cuts, but universities are bracing for uncertainty. The University of Pennsylvania could face a $250 million hit in N.I.H. funding alone....

In some cases, schools are pre-emptively cutting their expenses as a precautionary measure.

North Carolina State University announced on Feb. 14 that it was freezing most hiring. Stanford University announced on Feb. 26 that it was freezing staff hiring, citing “very significant risks” to the community. At the University of Louisville in Kentucky, President Kim Schatzel announced an “immediate pause” on faculty and staff hiring until July. She cited the potential loss of $20 to $23 million in N.I.H. research funding. Dozens of other schools have announced hiring freezes or “chills.”

Many of the cuts are now hitting graduate education...

A graduate program in biological sciences at the University of California, San Diego, usually enrolls 25 new graduate students a year. This year, the number will be 17....

At Penn, cuts to graduate programs were made across the board in the school’s 32 programs, professors said. The history department, for example, was asked to offer Ph.D. slots to only seven students, not the usual 17. In English, the normal cohort of 9 to 12 incoming students will be reduced to a maximum of six....

Columbia University, which receives about $1.3 billion a year in N.I.H. funding, could lose up to $200 million a year from the formula change, according to one analysis.... 

Schools with large endowments may also be a target of increased taxation....[D]uring Mr. Trump’s first term, Republicans led a charge to impose a 1.4 percent excise tax on the investment income of large private university endowments. Now there are discussions of raising it to 14 percent, or even 21 percent.

All this means next year's academic job market will be very tight.